iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonas Oesch @jonasoesch.ch · 05/03/2026

How to properly AI-generate alt-texts for charts A simple screenshot prompt produces texts that are too long and unstructured. By interviewing blind readers, Alessia Vannini and Julia Locher found a form that works much better. Report and examples: github.com/a-vannini/Al...

A stacked bar chart and the corresponding structured alt-text:

Horizontal bar chart. Title: Career choice follows old role patterns. Subtitle: Shares of women and men in various occupations in 2022, in percent. Horizontal axis: 0 to 100 percent. Vertical axis: Nursing and midwifery (vocational education and training), Electricity and energy (vocational education and training), Social work (students at universities of applied sciences), Engineering and IT (students at universities of applied sciences), Human medicine (students at traditional universities), Mechanical and electrical engineering (students at traditional universities). One bar per occupation, divided into two segments: Women (purple), Men (green).

In most occupational fields, a gender-specific distribution is evident.

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Jonas Oesch @jonasoesch.ch · 03/01/2026

A rough 3D reconstruction of «Le Constellation» in Crans-Montana. Using publicly available photos, videos and plans @simonhuwiler.ch, Forrest Rogers and I reconstructed the bar’s layout and approximate dimensions. www.nzz.ch/visuals/aktu...

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Brilliant choice of bivariate color palette in this map of water stress from @wriclimate.bsky.social & ESRI. I love how it draws attention to areas with high demand for water with saturated colors, & distinguishes low & high availability with a striking change in hue. via @dantoearth.bsky.social

Map of water availability and water stress in South America. The map uses a bivariate color palette with dark blue indicating high water availability and demand, light blue/cyan indicating high water availability and low demand, gray showing low water availability and demand, and orange indicating low water availability with high water demand. Most of the Amazon is low water stress. Atlantic Brazil, the west coast bordering the Andes, and the pampas region have the most water stress.

Map of water availability and water demand in North America. The map uses a bivariate color palette with dark blue indicating high water availability and demand, light blue/cyan indicating high water availability and low demand, gray showing low water availability and demand, and orange indicating low water availability with high water demand. Most of the Amazon is low water stress. Mexico and the U.S. northern plains and southwest have the most water stress. The Pacific Northwest, Great Lakes region, and northeast/Atlantic regions have high demand and availability. Alaska and northern Canada have high availability and low demand, except for the Alaskan North slope with lower availability and higher demand.

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Jonas Oesch @jonasoesch.ch · 03/12/2025

How the Swiss National Council has shifted over time: Analyzing every vote since 2004 shows that party differences have become more distinct, with fewer overlaps than in earlier years. www.nzz.ch/visuals/parl...

A ridgeline or joyplot showing the biggest parties in the Swiss National Council. The y-axis show the years sind 2004. The x-axis shows positioning from right to left. The curves indicate how members of different parties have voted.

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Jonas Oesch @jonasoesch.ch · 28/08/2025

Why Visual Journalism is so slow? I've tracked every hour I worked on an article for two weeks last year. Most of my time did not go into graphics production but in researching and analyzing data. The detailed breakdown and some ideas how to speed up the process: nightingaledvs.com/why-visual-j...

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Jonas Oesch @jonasoesch.ch · 20/06/2025

The balance of power in the Middle East has been shifting for some time. Iran’s allies are eroding, but its former rival Saudi Arabia is warming relations. Explore our updated interactive map: www.nzz.ch/english/inte...

Map of the middle east. Showing the axis of resistance and that the Hamas, Hezbollah, and former Syrian Army have been weakened.

Screenshot of an interactive map of the Middle East.

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NZZ Visuals @visuals.nzz.ch · 22/05/2025

2 Millionen Kubikmeter Gestein sind bereits bei Blatten abgebrochen, weitere 2 bis 4 Millionen Kubikmeter instabiles Material befinden sich noch am Berg. Wie gehts weiter? Die Szenarien von @jonasoesch.ch, @rolandshaw.bsky.social und Jan Ludwig. www.nzz.ch/visuals/die-... @nzz.ch

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Datawrapper @datawrapper.de · 20/05/2025

🗺️ If you’re a map enthusiast, be sure to read this week’s Data Vis Dispatch! You’ll also find charts on government spending, measles, and the Arctic. 🐻‍❄️🧊 www.datawrapper.de/blog/data-vi...

A map of Greenland, showing ice coverage and glacier movement speed in meters per year. Made by Perrin Remonté.

Four bar charts combined with a map each, showing common migration routes to the EU and how many people have been taking them since 2017. Published by Die Zeit.

A choropleth map of the U.S., showing areas with risk of climate-related hazards and public anxiety about climate change, among other things. For example, counties near coasts show a correlation between high anxiety and high exposure. Published by maps.com.

Several world maps with different projections and layouts, from a study on designs for readers using mobile devices by Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

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Bret Victor @worrydream.com · 15/05/2025

Computational Public Space. A talk about a values-driven approach to integrating computation into cities. (40 min) www.youtube.com/watch?v=PixP...

youtube.com

Computational Public Space

YouTube video by Dynamicland

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Thomas Ansart @thomasansart.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

Very nice! A few years back we faced the same problem and tried different solutions. From using a different projection to cutting the map and even rotating it. espace-mondial-atlas.sciencespo.fr/en/topic-res...

Projection Buckminster Fuller + rotation

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Harry Stevens @harrystevens.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

A trick for fitting world maps on phones: Stack two azimuthal equal-area projections, clipped at 90° longitude, each one rotated 180° from the other. The bottom map covers the top's Antarctica, which reduces the total height and looks nice. As seen in www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/c...

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Jonas Oesch @jonasoesch.ch · 14/05/2025

Better world maps for mobile! Despite years of mobile-first design, there’s been little experimentation in this area. So we designed our own at NZZ – and validated it in a large user study. Summary of the paper: jonasoesch.ch/articles/the... 1/3

Two smartphones displaying alternative thematic world maps.
The left screen shows a split-continent map with countries grouped and resized by region (e.g., Europe, Africa, Asia) using color to indicate data levels (legend: Hoch, Mittel, Tief, Sehr tief). Smaller countries like Rwanda and Panama are clearly labeled and more visible due to the rearranged layout.
The right screen displays a bubble map, where countries are represented by circles scaled to population size and shaded by data intensity. Larger countries like China and the U.S. have prominent bubbles, while smaller countries remain visible. Labels indicate population figures for Switzerland and China.

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Feodora Teti @feodorateti.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

What if the U.S. adjusted its tariffs on Germany and Switzerland to match what those countries charge? This NZZ chart by @florianseliger.bsky.social & @jonasoesch.ch shows how U.S. tariffs would rise under 3 "reciprocity" scenarios using my data from the Global Tariff Database 👇

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Now that we have vibe coding, we need vibe testing!

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Jonas Oesch @jonasoesch.ch · 21/03/2025

In recent months, Internet cables in the Baltic Sea have been damaged multiple times — Russian sabotage is suspected. But how does that work? Together with @cianjochem.bsky.social & @lukasmaeder.bsky.social , we visualized one case (inspired by Reuters 🤩) www.nzz.ch/ld.1875983

Infographic with a cable ship from above

Map showing the route of a Russian ship through the baltic sea and where it passed subsea cables.

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Shirley Wu @shirleywu.studio · 21/03/2025

two weeks ago I published www.shirleywu.studio/notebook/202... re: plateau in innovation I've felt in #dataviz last few years. I've been furiously working on the follow-up (so many thoughts!) & it'll finally be out next Monday 🎉 if you'd like an email notification: www.shirleywu.studio/notebook

shirleywu.studio

what killed innovation?: the past decade of interactive graphics, a brief recounting - Shirley Wu

Over the past decade, interactive data visualization has gone from bold experimentation to polished, predictable formats. I’ve been reflecting on why—and after speaking with some of the best in the fi...

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Ansgar Wolsing @ansgarw.bsky.social · 07/09/2023

🏠 Nice & clean → relatively low rent? 🏡 Gorgeous & beautiful → really expensive? Which adjectives in Craigslist rental posts for SF Bay Area go with which prices? #TidyTuesday | 2022 week 27

Nice and clean - relatively low rent?
Adjectives used to describe houses and apartments
in the San Francisco Bay Area in the titles of rental posts on Craigslist and how they are related to rental prices. Titles from 198,279 rental posts on Craigslist between 2000 and 2018. The 15 most frequent adjectives are shown.
Adjectives associated with prices below grand median: nice, clean, special.
Adjectives associated with prices above grand median: beautiful, single, gorgeous, furnished.

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John Alexis Guerra Gomez @johnguerra.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Do you want to animate a @vega-vis.bsky.social vega-lite or @observablehq.com Plot chart? Here is a quick experiment that might help you that animates between two SVGs. Let me know what you think! #dataviz. 👉🏼 observablehq.com/@john-guerra...

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Jonas Oesch @jonasoesch.ch · 24/02/2025

Swiss supermarket chain Migros promised price cuts—and delivered on many. But at the same time, products like chocolate and coffee became more expensive, reflecting global market trends. For most shoppers, the result is only modest savings. www.nzz.ch/ld.1869677

Beeswarm plot showing the change of product prices. A normal distribution with the center around zero.

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Matthias Stahl @higsch.com · 13/02/2025

What are people searching on Google when it comes to German election candidates? We visualized it! 📊 ➡️ first 10 free: www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web...

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 10/02/2025

Hello dataviz and design people! We're looking for a freelancer to help us with data visualization and/or diagrams at Works in Progress. We cover topics like housing, technology, health, energy, and much more, and experience in these areas is a plus! If this is you, get in touch! (details below)

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Marco Hernández @mhernandez.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

Some new stuff in Fun-tography mhinfographics.github.io/maps 🗺️✈️ a place for #map nerdies

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Jonas Oesch @jonasoesch.ch · 15/01/2025

Marius Irgens on distortions in vis: "A more common way to distort in […] visualization is through non-linear color mapping." True. Designing a truthful color mapping is incredibly difficult – if not impossible. But as he notes, you need to be transparent about it. nightingaledvs.com/distortion-b...

nightingaledvs.com

Distortion by Design - Nightingale

Explore the role of distortion in data visualization, its ethical implications, and use in enhancing comprehension or misleading audiences.

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Erwan Rivault @erwanrivault.com · 10/01/2025

NEW: 2024 has just been confirmed as the warmest year on record, and the first to breach the 1.5C threshold. We used a ridgeline (Joy Division inspired) chart to visualise daily temperature anomalies since 1940. 2024 clearly stands out with 100% of its days above 1.3C and 75% above 1.5C.

Ridgeline chart showing the distribution of global daily air temperature differences from the pre-industrial reference period (1850-1900), for every year between 1940 and 2024. Each individual year resembles a hill, shaded in a darker shade of red and further to the right for warmer years. The trend is clearly towards warmer years, with 2024 standing out as first year above 1.5C.

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Information is Beautiful @infobeautiful.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

Highlighting some exponential progress in the race to #netzero (by @billmckibben)

Three line graphs showing how incumbents underestimated exponential growth in renewable energy trends. Left graph shows new solar additions (GW) from 2015-2030, with actual data showing steep exponential growth (yellow line) versus more conservative linear forecasts. Center graph shows EV share of sales (%) from 2015-2030, with actual data showing exponential growth (blue line) versus linear forecasts. Right graph shows battery sales (GWh) from 2015-2030, with actual data showing exponential growth (red line) versus linear forecasts. All three graphs demonstrate that actual growth has followed an S-curve trend while forecasts consistently predicted slower, linear growth.

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NZZ Visuals @visuals.nzz.ch · 09/01/2025

Los Angeles brennt. Angefacht durch die Santa-Ana-Winde. Mit bis zu 113 Kilometer pro Stunde fegen sie über die Stadt. Verursacht haben sie die Brände aber nicht. Eine Analyse von @sventitz.bsky.social, @jonasoesch.ch, Roland Shaw, Jasmine Rüegg, @jeberhart.bsky.social 👉 www.nzz.ch/wissenschaft...

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 08/01/2025

Very important thread. Discontinuing fact checking *is* biased because it vastly favours one side of politics. (The side that is spreading disinformation more often, and if you don't know which side that is, you can find out by looking at the data below. Or any other data, there is a plenty).

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Konsta Happonen @konsta.happonen.eu · 04/01/2025

Visualizing uncertainty in stacked bar charts is a constant problem I face in my work. I absolutely *love* these fuzzy plots, so I made a gist to try them out using simulated data. #rstats gist.github.com/Koalha/d9403...

Bar charts with fuzzy boundaries between classes. The titles show the number of iterations the boundaries are based on (4000), the number of classes (5), the values of the Dirichlet distributions' concentration parameters (5, 15, 100), and the width of the quantile-based credible intervals between classes 1 and 2 (7, 18 and 30 percentage points).

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Joe Davies @joewdavies.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Bivariate maps showing the relationships between Temperature and Precipitation. Made with Plot, based on a great tutorial by Fil: observablehq.com/@jo... Data from TerraClimate (1958-present). #cartography #maps #mapping #climate #dataviz #SciArt

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Michael Freeman @afreeparticle.com · 28/12/2024

Nice looking graph from @financialtimes.com: “Never ever make predictions” Implied rates forecasts over time, and what rates have actually done:

A graph showing interest rates since 2000 (in blue) and forecasts based on futures markets branching off in completely different directions from the blue line (in pink)

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Priya Misner @priyamisner.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

project 1: Map Designer, a #dataviz tool and @figma.com plug in that simplifies the process creating and customizing maps in Figma! Had a lot of fun learning how to translate d3-geo's svg paths into Figma's vector networks. try it out and let me know what you think! www.figma.com/community/pl...

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Dragos Rezeanu @dragosrevision.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Stuff like this is genuinely fun as a silly game, but a reminder from your friendly neighborhood color vision scientist that it absolutely CANNOT be used to compare performance between people using different/uncalibrated displays or even the same display in different viewing environments.

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Bobby™ @schwbby.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

Forget all other file name pronunciations, I just heard someone call an SVG a “savage file”

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

How can we visualize what a book ISN'T talking about? With an anti-tag cloud! See the most common English words that are never mentioned in a text. www.bewitched.com/demo/anti/

bewitched.com

Anti-Tag Cloud

Visualize the negative space of literary works

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The Upshot @upshot.nytimes.com · 10/12/2024

The "slop" problem for A.I.: When generative A.I. is trained on a lot of its own output, it can get a lot worse. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

nytimes.com

When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself

As A.I.-generated data becomes harder to detect, it’s increasingly likely to be ingested by future A.I., leading to worse results.

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Dea Bankova @deabankova.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

♾️ Infinity: an interactive explorer A labour of love for half a year, going back to my roots in maths and rediscovering some of its beauty in the process. 💙💜💚 ⛏️ React, three.js, R3F, GSAP, d3.js #threejs #react #r3f #gsap #dataviz #creativecoding 🔗 maths-infinity.netlify.app

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Ian Johnson 🔬🤖 @enjalot.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

the algorithm is not some deity but a landscape, the feed is an uber ride across the manifold, only the windows are blacked out. what if you had a map of the algorithm? what if the UX of the feed let you look out of the window? musing with @infowetrust.com image from distill.pub/2017/aia/

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Amelia Wattenberger @wattenberger.com · 03/12/2024

🐟 some musings on how we might use LLMs 🐠 to interact with text at multiple levels of abstraction 🐡 inspired by the fish-eye lens

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Jonas Oesch @jonasoesch.ch · 03/12/2024

We've created an interactive map of actors in the Middle East. Click on any actor to uncover their allies, enemies, or frenemies 👉 www.nzz.ch/ld.1859853

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

New blog post! Updated for 2024, my favorite example of why alphabetical ordering is bad for geographic features -- US presidential results since 1828. The left image shows regional patterns in a geographic ordering that the right (alphabetical) simply loses. benschmidt.org/post/2024-11...

A heatmap of years and states, showing a large blue cluster in the center where Southern states vote Democratic. and other geographical patterns.

A heatmap of years and states in alphabetical order, showing no clear global structure

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Christian Endt @cendt.de · 29/11/2024

Sie haben nächste Woche einen wichtigen Auswärtstermin? Unser neues @zeit.de Tool sagt Ihnen, welchen Zug Sie nehmen sollten, um pünktlich anzukommen. Dafür hat @selinarudolph.bsky.social die Verspätungen von knapp 150.000 Bahnverbindungen ausgewertet. www.zeit.de/mobilitaet/2...

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Jon Keegan @jonkeegan.com · 29/11/2024

Something is happening with engagement on Bluesky. I ran a little analysis looking at a few recent news stories from NYT, WSJ and CNN across X, Threads and Bluesky and it looks like engagement on Bluesky is much higher when you account for the size of the platforms. sherwood.news/tech/bluesky...

A chart showing higher engagement on Bluesky for several news stories compared to Threads and X

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Simon Huwiler @simonhuwiler.ch · 11/11/2024

Wo gibt es noch günstigen Wohnraum in Zürich? Wir haben über Monate Immoportale ausgelesen und diese interaktive Stadt gebaut. www.nzz.ch/visuals/koen... @jonasoesch.bsky.social @nzz.ch

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Markus Ikehata @markus-ikehata.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Satellite images show: Israel is building roads and military bases in the Gaza Strip - do these indicate a permanent occupation? A visual analysis by @jeberhart.bsky.social -not only on the front of our newspaper but also told in a highly visual and interactive format: www.nzz.ch/internationa... 👈 🛰️

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John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch.ft.com · 19/11/2024

Despite a massive head start, BlueSky has now overtaken Threads in the US 👇

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